WOW! My goal is to develop niche apps for the music professional market so I have a lot of old ideas and mountains of failed designs to go on when I say those two apps are fantastic. In composition courses we used to make sketches just like that to start a work, as well as make density graphs for Penderecki and company.
All I can say is I wish you the best, I think you have some great designs there.
Media plays both sides of the coin because they don't care about what happens to other media sources, they care about the ad revenue from clicks to their site. Playing both sides of the coin only increases clicks since both perspectives are engaged.
Human activity weathers stone monuments faster than desert winds. If I recall correctly, the original sheathing stones and capstones of the pyramids were gradually stolen. The Sphinx was used for target practice.
Water, on the other hand, will tear through your stones much more quickly. In a wet, temperate climate, the weak acid falling from the sky will wear limestone. The moisture invading cracks and freezing will widen those cracks. Lichens will bore tiny holes into the rock, and plant roots will cause fissures to expand. Additionally, moisture that penetrates to metallic structural reinforcement will oxidize and swell that reinforcement to pop bits off of the stone (observable from earlier attempts at restoration at the Parthenon, where the replacement anchor pins weren't coated in lead correctly, and they started to crack the rock blocks--now they use non-corroding titanium pins). Sometimes mortar does not swell or expand at the same rate as whatever it binds, and something will crack, admit water, and generally deteriorate from there.
Water is the enemy of preservation. They pyramids didn't survive just because they are stone, but because they are also dry.
And on a long enough geological timescale, every potential building site will eventually experience every climate, including being entirely immersed in salt water.
This was the first I've heard that assertion, so it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Turns out it's a common story that Napoleon used the Sphinx for target practice, hence the lost nose. It also turns out that that is most certainly not true. Napoleon, being wholeheartedly in favor of the enlightenment, would never have destroyed antiquities (only plundered them for his own profit -- lets not forget that the Rosetta Stone was discovered during a Napoleonic campaign).
Further, a 15th century Arab historian notes that the nose was missing in his era and "attributes the loss of the nose to iconoclasm by Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr—a Sufi Muslim from the khanqah of Sa'id al-Su'ada—in AD 1378, upon finding the local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest. Enraged, he destroyed the nose, and was later hanged for vandalism."[0]
The way I heard it, the target practice was responsible for the loss of a piece of an ear. Not having been there to see it myself, I suppose I am not a reliable source for this. Thanks for the fact-checking, as I didn't think to do it myself.
I can't tell if this comment is serious or not but I find it odd that people who know fuck all about science go around bashing people over the head with it.
The dogmatic belief also has side effects. If you have ever been with someone you considered generally wise but also held on to some non-scientific belief, you know two things.
1. Taking away the non-scientific belief will cause a genuine vacuum in their life, and what comes in to fill it usually takes away the happiness they had earlier
2. The dogmatic folks don't put any/much importance on what a moving target science is, and how badly it conflicts with normal folks need for permanence. Some of them will scoff at this as "unwillingness to change", but realistically speaking no one likes change just for the heck of change unless it is an actual improvement of some aspect of their life. Society has "changed" towards embracing more materialism, but its side effect of less human connection is not an improvement that most people actually desire.
So do you wish to be happy and contented? Don't expect science to give you an answer.
If there is something that science cannot provide, then it is just another tool in your toolkit and will continue to co-exist with other things which can make you happier, no matter how "unscientific" those things are.
What's the alternative to rationalism and materialism? How can good science be practiced without rational reasoning and physical (i.e. material) evidence?
> dogmatic belief in the supremacy of rationalism and materialism
good science absolutely must take a rationalist and materialist view. however, the needs of good science are not necessarily the supreme values which to make any and all decisions.
Lots of things! Because I'm not actually a practicing researcher. And the set of practicing researchers I've known is, perhaps not so oddly, disjoint with the set of dogmatic scientific positivists I've known. No one has a better grasp of the vast difference between ideal science and real science than someone who actually does science for a living.
Science can tell you how things work and how to achieve particular results. It can't tell you what is important, because that's fundamentally a question of human values.
